1. Nasals + Liquids + Everything Else
December 4, 2015

2. The Daily Heads Up I have review sheets!
I also have some spectrograms for you to decipher!
Production Exercise #4 is due tonight at 5 pm!
Final Exam:
Saturday, December 12th
8-10 am (!)
Kinesiology B 126
Guess what? There is a production component to the final exam.
The production exam will be ed to everyone by the end of Monday.

3. Nasals
Nasals are the sonorants with the greatest amount of constriction in the vocal tract.
Nasals are produced with an open velo-pharyngeal port
Flow of air is stopped in the mouth
Air flows freely through the nose
Air pressure does not build up behind stop constriction.
 Voicing is not impeded at the glottis.
Note: the speech ready position
Check out the Ken Stevens X-ray film.

4. Nasal Stops
Note: anywhere you can produce an oral stop, you can also produce a nasal stop.
Check out all the nasals in Yanyuwa:

5. Plus One
You can also get a nasal stop at one place of articulation where oral stops never occur
Labio-dental:
Peter says: [ama]
occurs allophonically in:
English “dumbfounded”, “comfort”, (“Banff”)
Catalan “infermer”; Italian “invece”
Note: flow of air through nose reduces airflow through mouth
vocal tract airflow too weak for frication at the labio-dental closure.

6. Voiceless Nasals Nasalization is disastrous for fricatives.
There are no (uncontroversial) nasal fricatives in the languages of the world.
There are, however, voiceless nasals in a few languages.
Examples from Burmese:

7. Breathy Voiced Nasals
Distinctions between voiced and breathy voiced nasals are also possible.
Examples from Newari (spoken in Nepal):

8. Nasal Acoustics The acoustics of nasal stops are quite complex.
Here’s the general pattern of what to look for in a spectrogram for nasals:
Periodic voicing.
Overall amplitude lower than in vowels.
Low frequency first formant.
Higher formants have low intensity.
Formants have broad “bandwidths”.
Let’s account for each of these acoustic characteristics in turn.

9. Decreased Overall Amplitude

10. Damping
The decreased overall amplitude of nasals is due to several factors, including damping.
Recall that resonance occurs when:
a sound wave travels through an object
that sound wave is reflected...
...and reinforced, on a periodic basis
The periodic reinforcement sets up alternating patterns of high and low air pressure
= a standing wave

11. Resonance in a closed tube

12. Damping, schematized In a closed tube:
With only one pressure pulse from the loudspeaker, the wave will eventually dampen and die out
Why?
The walls of the tube absorb some of the acoustic energy, with each reflection of the standing wave.

13. Damping Comparison A heavily damped wave wil die out more quickly...
Than a lightly damped wave:

14. Damping Factors The amount of damping in a tube is a function of:
The volume of the tube
The surface area of the tube
The material of which the tube is made
More volume, more surface area = more damping
Think about the resonant characteristics of:
a Home Depot
a post-modern restaurant
a movie theater
an anechoic chamber

15. An Anechoic Chamber

16. Inside Your Nose In nasals, air flows through the nasal cavities.
The resonating “filter” of nasal sounds therefore has:
increased volume
increased surface area
 increased damping
Damping decreases amplitude…
And spreads energy across a wider range of frequencies.
= increased bandwidth

17. Bandwidth in Spectrograms
F3 of
F3 of [m]
The formants in nasals have increased bandwidth, in comparison to the formants in vowels.

18. Nasal Plosion One last, random thing about nasals--
It is possible to “release” an oral stop closure by opening up the velo-pharyngeal port.
The release burst caused thereby is referred to as nasal plosion.
Peter says hidden, sadden, sudden, leaden
with nasal plosion
without nasal plosion
Nasal plosion occurs in “pre-stopped” nasals in Russian:
[dno] “bottom” [dna] “of the day”

19. Perceiving Nasal Place
Nasal “murmurs” do not provide particularly strong cues to place of articulation.
Can you identify the following as [m], [n] or ?
Repp (1986) found that listeners can only distinguish between [n] and [m] 72% of the time.
Transitions provide important place cues for nasals.
Repp (1986): 95% of nasals identified correctly when presented with the first 10 msec of the following vowel.
Can you identify these nasal + transition combos?
1 = alveolar
2 = bilabial
3 = velar
1 = velar
2 = alveolar
3 = bilabial